The Thunder God
by pr3tty-odd
Summary: The Thunder God won't always be around to protect her from the storms. Eclare. Clare/Jake sibling relationship. AU. ONESHOT.


**A/N: **This is an idea that popped into my head yesterday and I just had to write it. I didn't really have a set plot. I just kept writing and writing, and this is the result. It's basically two stories (Eclare and Clare/Jake) intertwined. I was going to make these two separate stories, but I think they work better together.

A few things I should point out: 1. This is AU and takes place in Florida. 2. Clare and Eli are from Chicago (it's my hometown and I thought it would work better for this story than Toronto). 3. Clare and Jake are biological siblings so pretend Randall Edwards doesn't even exist.

Shout out to Becca (goldsworthys/irishbastards on tumblr) for making the flawless edit for this story.

Enjoy, and please review! :)

* * *

When we broke into the house, I thought maybe - just maybe - it would be romantic.

"It's technically squatting, Clare," Eli said as we passed the city limits. "We're just broke, not actually homeless."

Jacksonville shrank in the rear view mirror until I couldn't see the Mayo Clinic anymore. An illuminated billboard read _Atlantian Gardens, Coming Soon_. As we drove along the beach front lined with sandbags, toward the housing development where we would sleep that night, I watched the shapes of windows merge into constellations of lights. A pall of thunderclouds crawled over the ocean toward the glow where the familiar square of my brother's hospital room had gone dark last spring. There had been nothing to see - regular room with a new patient, just like Eli said - but he drove me all the way from Illinois anyway, and now there was nowhere else to go.

"You gonna be all right?" Eli asked. He kept his eyes vigilant on the curving road, but reached across the gearshift to awkwardly squeeze my knee. "We're going to crash one of these mansions before the fucking yuppies move in," he said. "It's totally romantic."

"Okay," I said.

That was how Eli took care of me. When my dog Charlie died, he left me alone to mope around my room and empty a box of tissues. That night though, he climbed up the trellis to my window with a pair of (what I correctly assumed) stolen kittens cradled in his shirt like balled-up socks. They were tiny, probably a week or two old, and we named them Hazel and Gus. That was the night I told Eli I loved him.

When our headlights crawled onto the cul-de-sac, the unfinished subdivision looked like a row of Christmas presents wrapped up in white paper. They faced away from the beach where thick, anvil-shaped clouds swelled over the water. A few houses had siding and lawns already, and Eli picked one with French doors and an iron gate. His plan to get in was to climb up to a window and come down to let me in - which he explained as I was boosting him up on top of the garage.

"What do you want me to do?" I asked.

He stuck his head over the ledge of the roof and his unwashed black hair hung dangling over his eyes, "You're the lookout, remember?"

I was always lookout. This was Eli's way of including me, but he was really just keeping me out of the way while he did something dangerous or stupid. I guess it was his way of protecting me.

I watched from the ground as Eli wrapped his scarecrow legs around the drain pipe and scrambled up the side of the house. Everything made too much noise; the gutter groaned as he pulled himself up, the roof tiles crackled under his feet, and the window screeched as he opened it. I crouched into my sweatshirt, and hunched down behind a garden wall to watch the street for headlights. A siren wailed somewhere and I flinched, but it soon disappeared into the night.

"But what if I see someone?" I called up to him.

Eli already had one foot inside the window and he shrugged. "Then we're screwed," he called back, and disappeared into the house.

I watched the windows of the house for the movement of Eli's shadow, something to tell me that he was okay - that he hadn't broken his leg, or set off a security system, or cracked his head open on the stairs - and that I wouldn't have to call an ambulance or ride to a police station and explain to an impatient man with a pen who I was and where I was supposed to be. We had come to visit a special place, and now we were trespassing because Eli didn't know what to do with me. No one did. It was getting harder to think of this trip as romantic. If it wasn't, somehow that wouldn't be Eli's fault.

He had been inside for a long time, leaving me standing on a stranger's deck while dark clouds oozed toward shore and made the ocean uneasy. Waves rushed to escape them and one by one collapsed on the sand. The palms in the yard shuddered and the empty mansions seemed nervous, fluttering their house wrap with the anticipation of a storm.

I had been afraid of thunderstorms since the summer I turned six, when lightning struck our garage during my birthday party. Dad had hung white Christmas lights over the deck, and just as we sat down to eat cake off paper plates, just as my brother said it looked like rain, a white roar cut a scar down the side of our garage and the Christmas lights exploded in a hail of glass. I remember hiding under the picnic table as rain began to fall, unwilling to speak or move because I was certain the sky had condemned me.

It was during weather like this when my brother Jake promised he could keep me safe. Lightning would strike elsewhere, the walls of the house would hold up against the wind, and tomorrow we would still be alive. That was years ago, when I was small and my brother was still strong enough to be magic. I pulled up my hood against the wind and looked up into the dark face of the house.

"Don't be afraid," I said, trying to sound convincing. "The storm will come, and then it will pass. We just have to stick together and be brave until it's over."

When Eli appeared in the patio door, I felt a skip of relief, like I had been airborne and now my feet were on solid ground.

"Check it out," he said. He had a blanket from the car thrown over his shoulder and a pair of six-packs hooked in his fingers. When Eli pushed the hood off my forehead and led me inside by the hand, I was shocked by how much I still needed someone to ground me.

We sat and smoked on the deck with the blanket pulled over us, kicking empty beer cans into the dry pool and listening to the clatter echo off the concrete walls. Past the railing, the waves were gray and agitated, throwing themselves toward the ledge and shattering into spray against the rocks. The anvil clouds were heavy and easy to drop, and they seemed to pulse. I felt the wind hold its breath and my spine straightened into a rod. Far out over the water, the clouds flared purple and a forked tongue of lightning connected the ocean and the sky for the length of a heartbeat. I grabbed Eli's hand and squeezed my eyes shut, counting like Jake taught me, and listening for the voice of thunder. _One thousand, two thousand, three thousand..._

I remembered the laughter in Jake's voice from a night years before when I crawled into his bed after a thunderclap frightened me awake.

_"Come out, scaredy-cat. It's farther away than you think._

_Jake reached into the blankets, hooked his arms under mine, and hoisted me up onto the window box next to him. It had been so black outside, I could only see the clawed shape of the maple tree in our backyard. Jake had poured over books on weather phenomena and tried to explain them to me in a way I could understand: that lightning was a natural electrical phenomenon and not out to get me, but science was as real to me as magic. All I wanted my brother to do was make it stop._

_That night he said, "Okay."_

_My brother rubbed his palms together, then lifted me into his lap and lowered his cheek next to mine to stare down the storm. His breathing slowed and his eyes slid closed, deep into a trance. He raised an arm above his head, extending one finger toward the sky, and I clutched my blanket, not daring to look away. Outside, the wind paused, the maple tree settled down, and the rain slowed to a gentle patter. The world was waiting for his command._

_With a slash of his finger, Jake drew a line through our window and a silver blade of lightning slit the sky. The windowpanes shuddered with thunder, I shrieked and turned away, and in the flash of ghostly light, I understood the whole room: Jake's bare walls, the outlines of dust in the shape of his posters, the stack of empty boxes under his bed, the shirts in plastic hanging in his closet, my brother's bones pressing through the surface of his skin - and in that moment I knew my brother was leaving me. His breath shuddered out all at once as he sank back against the wall with an exhausted smile._

_"How did you do that?" I whispered in a mixed state of shock, confusion, and awe._

_Jake's blue eyes crackled with excitement and something like a promise. "Because I'm the Thunder God."_

I was certain that first lightning bolt had severed something invisible that tied our family together because soon after, our parents separated and Jake stayed with Dad. After they moved to a suburb an hour or two away, it was storms that held us together. When lightning would strike near my house, I would call my father in tears, begging him to put Jake on the phone, and when my brother laughed, I could hear the same rumble of thunder through the phone.

"I'm taking care of it," he would say. "The Thunder God has got your back."

My brother knew more about the weather than anyone, even the people on the news, so it had to be true. He drew pictures of clouds and quoted me their secret names - the white house tails of cirrus uncinus and the towering castle turrets of cumulus castellanus. He could guess the temperature outside to a degree, he knew days before it would rain, and with his microscope, Jake had showed me the crystal geography of snowflakes. Lightning and thunder were creatures I wasn't sure Jake could control, but I still wanted him to be the Thunder God.

I didn't believe in any higher power, and lightning still shook the sweat from my skin, but when a storm meant the chance to hear my brother's voice, I prayed every night for rain. A thunderstorm would bring us closer when my house was empty, and as Jake and I each sat at a window, holding the phone to our ears and waiting for a flash. Then we would count together, his whisper on top of mine, until the voice of thunder bridged the space between us and filled our rooms to the walls.

Far away from me, Jake began to weaken. He had always been sickly, and then he was just sick with something doctors couldn't agree to diagnose but were sure could not be cured. Whatever "it" was, autoimmune, cancer, or genetic dysfunction, Jake's body was rejecting itself. As I got older and grew taller and only a little bit fuller, Jake slipped farther away. When I was switching from training bras to the real deal, Jake was getting a port installed in his chest so the drugs regimens wouldn't erode his skin. While I was trying to make friends, Jake was in a hospital bed with a meteorology textbook between his knobby knees. That was all he wanted to talk about. Whenever he called or I visited, Jake would lecture me about ionization and electromagnetic radiation, and he always sounded thrilled. This magic of the weather sustained my brother, and he sustained me until he was gone.

Then there was Eli. He was a mysterious and mean-looking boy from my high school who wore black shirts and skinny jeans. He was in my English class and we were partnered together once for a project, our partnership consisting of us doing our own work and then putting it together at the end.

One day I was waiting for the bus after school, and when a shower started up, I couldn't bring myself to go outside. My father and brother had moved to live near the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville where Jake could get experimental treatments, and with Jake miles away, I felt lightning bolts hanging in the clouds above me, waiting to drop. I froze in the doorway that day, people thumping past me with their backpacks. I waited in the vestibule while the rain fell, watching the last of the buses pull away, and then I saw Eli walking toward me with his keys in his fist.

"Hey," he said. "It looks like shit outside. Want a ride?"

What I loved about Eli was that he refused to let fear or anything else stop him from doing what he wanted, even if it was me that was afraid. Whenever I was worried about Jake, we would go on an "adventure", where he'd pick me up in his car, point it in one direction, and drive until we ran out of road, listening to his CD collection.

It made me comfortable enough to talk about Jake, and Eli let me. I told him about the hospital visits and the stuff my brother was learning. Sometimes I complained about my dad and how protective he was of Jake and how distant he was toward me, and Eli just drove with his eyes set ahead on the road. I was never sure if he was listening, but he never interrupted me or seemed uncomfortable, even when I ended up crying. I could talk until I had voiced every worry, and when I was empty, Eli would reach into the backseat, grab his binder of CDs and put it in my lap.

"Pick something," he would say, and I loved him a little.

_**xxxx**_

The first time I let Eli touch me - really touch me, more than fumbling over the gearshift in his Toyota - was ironically in church.

Mom's new boyfriend was raised Lutheran and took us to every council meeting and choir practice and potluck dinner, and I started bringing Eli just so I wouldn't feel outnumbered. I knew he was Atheist, but after begging and promising that he wouldn't burn or spontaneously combust upon walking in, he finally agreed to come. We wandered all over the building, rifling through drawers in the empty offices and scrunched ourselves onto the tiny plastic chairs in the nursery with its colored pictures of Jesus and the twelve disciples looking like they were in a death metal band, much to Eli's amusement. But mostly we just made out. In stairwells, in the library, and one time during a Saturday night choir rehearsal, Eli dragged me into the janitor's closet.

It was cramped and dark, and smelled like ammonia and lemon air freshener. The door opened in, so Eli pushed me up against it. I had my hands in his hair, he had his fingers hooked in my belt loops, and everything was hasty and unplanned just how he liked it. I was starting to get lightheaded, and not the good kind.

"Can we go somewhere else?" I panted.

"Why?" He had started on my neck and it felt amazing, but the stench of all the cleaners overpowered that.

"It stinks in here. Let's go somewhere else."

Eli pushed up my shirt, and the door was cold against my back. "It's not so bad in here," he said. "You smell fucking great."

I caught his fingers in my hair and shook my head. I tried to smile, but I felt dizzy. "How about we go back to your car?"

He grinned and pulled at my belt buckle, which came open without protest. "Too long of a walk. And we fool around there all the time. Come on, we've been wanting to do this forever."

Swallowing felt thick, like a mouthful of glue. I was trying to catch my breath through the chemical haze, sweating nervously, and Eli must have taken that as an encouragement. His fingers were cold as he pulled open my jeans. I tried to think of it as exciting. We were fooling around in church, while outside the door and across the hall, my mother and her balding boyfriend were singing "A Mighty Fortress is Our God" in warbling voices. Eli was always getting me to do things I didn't think I'd like - climbing fences into graveyards, driving out to the middle of nowhere to see a punk show in an abandoned barn - and this had to be no different. Eli was just getting me to open up and stop worrying so much, As his cold fingers blundered into me, I heard the choir singing another chorus of a different song: "Hearts unfold like flowers before thee, opening to the sun above."

_**xxxx**_

A few weeks later, we were in Eli's crawlspace. If the basement was its guts, pumping heat and water through ducts and pipes, this was its hidden heart and I had gotten inside. It smelled like sawdust and dried-out pine needles from the boxes of Christmas ornaments stacked under the stairs. There was a crib and a high chair packed against the wall with rolls of spare carpet and a battered vacuum cleaner, but the box I wanted to break open, to raid and steal away, was in the far corner next to where Eli sat. His arm was propped up on it.

"What's that?" I asked, but I already knew. It was marked _Photo Albums _on the side. I had maneuvered Eli there, I had planned this deliberately, to ask him for a tour of his house on weekend while his parents were away. In that box was the childhood Eli never told me about, although he knew nearly every detail of mine. He had told me tidbits here and there when he wasn't paying attention enough to censor himself. Eli had been inside me, and now I wanted to see the inside of him.

"It's just crap," he said, lifting the flap of the box. "Old pictures from when I was a kid."

"Can I see?"

He shrugged, and I slid over next to him, pressing my hip against his as Eli lifted a leather-bound album out of the box. He opened it across both our laps. Here were his baby pictures, his mother with creases around her mouth, tired behind her eyes but happy, his father propping him up toward the TV. These made me want to meet his parents even more because they looked like great people. I flipped the page, looking for the great secret that would explain his reluctance and solitude, like a lost twin or a missing father, but my expectations had been too high. They seemed like average pictures of Eli at the beach, riding his first bike, and playing with a girl in the lawn of a house I didn't recognize.

"Is this your first house?" I asked, pointing to the picture.

"Yeah." Eli glanced at it and turned the page for me. I flipped it back to get a better look at it: a squat little brick one-story house with a small yard. In most of these pictures, Eli was playing with a group of kids clustered around him in a sandbox or following him pulling a wagon. But in all of the pictures I recognized of Eli's new house, the one we were hidden inside, he was alone. In the pictures, he sat on his bike or the seat of a swing and glared at the camera like the sun was in his eyes, or posed stiffly with his parents, standing slightly aside. There in glossy print was evidence of what I felt, this strange space around Eli that pushed people aside.

"This was in Park Ridge," he said. "My parents didn't have a lot of money then, but it was pretty great. Kids in school liked me, and I was cool. All the neighborhood kids followed me around. There was this little girl, Imogen, who lived next door who never left me alone. She'd knock on my door every day and ask my mom if I could come out. I'd play with her for a while, doctor or house or whatever, but then I'd get bored and tell her I was going inside to watch TV. She just waited outside for me, sometimes for hours. My mom yelled at me for leaving her out there, but I guess I didn't care." He laughed. "Everyone just liked me. I'd probably be popular now if I had stayed there."

I was treading lightly now. "What about here?" Would he have missed not meeting me?

"We moved here when I was ten," he said, his voice wavering, "and I hated it. I just never felt right, like I'd been taken away from my home. I guess that was when I stopped trusting my parents. You know, and people."

"At least you met me, right?"

I watched his face as he let out a small laugh. "Right." He closed the photo album in his lap and stared out for a moment across the crawlspace into the corner with his baby furniture and the rolled-up carpet and the old vacuum cleaner. I waited quietly for him to say that he at least trusted me, but he didn't. He just packed the book back from the box and got up. It hurt. Sure, I knew his favorite music and his pet peeves and basic need-to-know things like that, but Eli basically knew my entire life story, yet I knew nothing besides the small amount of information he had just told me. It was then that I realized I was dating, but more importantly, sleeping with someone I barely knew.

_**xxxx**_

The last time I talked to Jake, I was sixteen and he was at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville. He had come down with another infection, and I found out later that fluid had been accumulating in his lungs. I wanted to fly out and see him, but Jake told me to wait.

"Don't skip school to see your older brother getting over a cough," he said. His voice was raspy and I said so. "I'll be fine. Come see me this summer when it's warm," Jake told me. "Florida has an incredible storm season.

With the phone wedged between my ear an my shoulder as I washed dishes, I could see Jake propped up in his hospital bed next to a big picture window looking out over the ocean. His hair would probably be all gone by now, and he'd be thinner, the hospital gown draped over his bones like a shirt on a wire hanger.

"Just be okay," I said, and tried to make him laugh. "It's been raining here a lot and I might need you to turn off a thunderstorm."

"You know I can't do that, Clare. But I finally figured it out." I imagined Jake sitting up in bed and leaning toward the window with the hospital phone. "I learned the secret to thunderstorms." His voice dropped to a whisper. "Telluric currents."

"What?"

"Earth is like a generator," Jake said. "The tectonic plates and the oceans move through the Earth's magnetic field and charge the planet with electricity. The whole world is conductive, Clare. It's happening under our feet. Energy travels through the water and the ground through telluric currents - like invisible power lines right underneath us. The charge builds up wherever they merge and turns clouds into thunderstorms."

Jake was thrilled, but the thought made my toes curl in my shoes. I imagined an electric current snaking below me, chasing my footsteps wherever I went, and twisting the clouds into thunderstorms."

"Can you avoid them?" I asked, "Or stop them? How do you get away?"

"They're everywhere," Jake said. "It's just a part of nature. You can't run from the worst storms, so you have to find shelter and wait it out. Or maybe you take the risk and chase the storm down just to look it in the eye. You're more likely to die of cancer than lightning," he said with a laugh.

"Is that what made you the Thunder God?"

"No," he sighed. "Storms are still dangerous. I'm just not afraid of them."

_**xxxx**_

A month went by and I hadn't heard from Jake. The chemo cycles made him weak and lethargic, but he hadn't told me that he was scheduled for another regimen like he usually did. I was spending most of my time with Eli or doing schoolwork, but my thoughts had been drifting to Jake. I tried calling his room, but the nurse told me he had been moved to another hospital. I left voicemails at the house, and even tried calling my dad, but no one would get back to me. I couldn't concentrate on school, and Eli was becoming more distant and avoiding me because I wouldn't stop worrying about my brother and it was starting to annoy him.

The call came on a Saturday night when I was holed up in my room with an earth science textbook. It was raining outside and I was rewriting my notes on cloud formations. Copying down those names and drawings was mindless and mechanical and made sense. When my phone rang, I thought it was Eli wanting to go for a night drive and fool around, but it was my dad's voice.

"Where's Jake?" I asked him. "Can I talk to him? Where are you right now?"

"I'm at the house, Clare. Listen-"

"Well, is he with you, or is he at the hospital? No one at the hospital will let me talk to him."

"Clare... Jake died yesterday. Pneumonia."

_**xxxx**_

When someone you love dies, before the tears, before you collapse, before you scream and try to disbelieve it, there's a calm that surrounds you. It's like being lifted up on a cloud, up from the phone in your hand, up out of your room and your house, up above time, just light breezes and stillness. This is the place where memories live. I remembered my brother and the last time I saw him as he really was, with messy brown hair and his own clothes, carrying a jacket and a small radio older than us before a thunderstorm. The ground was still dry, and Jake was trying to put on his jacket and tune to a weather report at the same time. Why he didn't just watch the news on TV, I would never know. I was watching from the bedroom window, not supposed to tell Mom and Dad that Jake had sneaked out. With his back to me, his neck lifted up as he listened to the throaty thunder, my brother looked invincible.

_**xxxx**_

I don't know what I expected Eli to do, since I never could be sure - and that was probably what I loved most about him - but trespassing, broke, sitting on a stranger's deck hundreds of miles from home while the fury of a thunderstorm glared down on us, that was not what I wanted. I wanted to see the clinic where my brother died, and now I wanted to go home.

The first raindrop hit me on the earlobe and the rest hurried after it, splattering the deck with dark spots. We ran to the patio door as the spots expanded and engulfed each other until the whole slab of concrete was dark and shiny slick. Inside, the house was cavernous up to the vaulted ceiling, with sharp shadows and bare walls. The two of us dripped onto the carpet, clothes clinging to our skin.

"We'll camp upstairs," Eli said, heading toward them.

"Wait," I said. "Can we just leave?"

The rain was falling in a torrent now, like someone had torn the belly of the clouds with a knife. It poured off the roof tiles and splashed onto the deck, ran down the sides of the drained pool, rising until the empty beer cans started to float.

Eli gripped the stair railing and looked at me like I had just peed my pants or something, like I was an idiot, like it was the stupidest thing I had ever said so far.

"We just got here. You dragged me down to Florida and now you want to leave?"

"I didn't ask you to break into someone's house for me! I just wanted to see-"

"To see your brother," he said. "To see the place where he lived in a hospital for years, and what, get a memento? A bedpan? A puke bucket? Jake is gone Clare. He just died, but he's been gone for years, and you still haven't learned how to be alone."

I stood there, tears forming in my eyes as raindrops formed in clouds. They began to precipitate and if Eli wasn't on the stairs, my inner lightning would have slapped him across the face. But then came the thunder.

"Fuck you, Eli!" I yelled to him. "Why are you so fucking insensitive? My brother just died and I needed closure. Can't you be a good boyfriend and comfort me? Why do you have to be such a fucking jerk all the time?"

"I'm not a jerk. I'm not going to stand here and fucking sugarcoat everything for you like everyone else in your life has."

"Maybe I need you to sugarcoat everything just a little! Jake was everything to me and now he's gone. You have no idea what I'm going through, Eli."

He walked down the stairs until he was standing right in front of me, the look on his face scaring me more than the storm outside.

"You think I've never lost anyone, Clare? I-"

"Losing some friends when you moved away isn't the same, Eli! If you didn't avoid everyone and everything, you could have made friends, it's not hard. But no, Eli Goldsworthy would rather push everyone away and-"

"My parents died!" he yelled in my face.

My heart stopped beating and I could feel all the color leave my face. I felt as if I couldn't breathe, but I choked out, "What?"

"Cece and Bullfrog aren't my birth parents. They adopted me when I was ten and that's why I had to leave Park Ridge."

I opened my mouth to say something, anything. But Eli continued to speak.

"They were on their way to pick me up from school when they got into a huge car accident that killed seven people, including them."

"Eli... I-"

"I sat in the school office wondering why my parents were late... why they had forgotten about me. My mom was pregnant and I was always angry, but now that I think of it, it was more of a jealousy thing. I was an only child and having a younger brother or sister would meant that I wouldn't be their number one priority anymore. God, I was so selfish," he said, shaking his head.

"I assumed they were late because they were doing something for the baby... they were _always _doing something for the baby. Painting the nursery, going to the doctor, shopping for baby clothes and blankets and shit, it was always about the baby. I didn't understand the whole thing back then, that babies need love and care and whatever before their born." He paused and then let out a laugh. "I remember that being the only time I actually wished Imogen was with me so she could talk my ear off because I was so bored. And I was angry because I thought they had forgotten about me... that they didn't care anymore."

When I realized he wasn't going to talk anymore, I pulled his body to mine, squeezing him tighter than I ever had, and I almost sobbed in happiness when he wrapped his arms around me just as tight. I was about to apologize a million times when I felt his body shake against mine. I felt happy, as selfish as it sounds, because he was _finally _opening up to me. After two years of being together, he finally let me in.

"That's why I avoided you when Charlie died, and I thought getting you a new dog would help, but they're harder to steal than little kittens, hence Gus and Hazel. It's why I've been distancing myself from you lately. I-I knew Jake was going to die."

I pulled away from him and wiped my face with my cold hands. "Why is it that _everyone _knew besides me? Am I really that naive?"

"Well, yeah, just a bit. But I knew because Jake told me."

"What? When?"

"He called me a few weeks ago and told me his body had completely given up and that he was dying. Keep in mind, this is the first time we have ever really talked - minus the time I interrupted your Skype chat and introduced myself - so it was kind of odd and morbid. He started talking about clouds and lighting and thunder, and I think it was all supposed to be a metaphor. I really have no idea."

I let out a small laugh, picturing Jake explaining telluric currents to Eli and the confused and probably uncaring face Eli had while listening.

"He told me that I needed to protect you from thunderstorms. Again, I think it was all a metaphor meaning or something. Like he wanted me to protect you from the bad things in life, maybe? Ha, leave it to me to metaphorically analyze everything."

"And are you going to?"

"Protect you?"

I nodded.

"I promised Jake, so of course." He reached out and grabbed my hand in his. "I love you."

This time I actually let out a sob, cherishing the moment. Eli opened up to me, he promised to protect me, and he loved me. My emotions took over as I grabbed his head in my hands and kissed him, giving him the kind of kiss we hadn't shared in weeks. I reached for the buttons on his shirt and once they were undone, he threw it to the floor, mine soon following after it. He pulled me closer to him as we sank down to the floor.

We had sex. We had sex for the first time in weeks. We had sex on the cold, bare floor of a stranger's home, the sound of rain hitting the roof as our melody. For a moment, I forgot about Jake and my parents and everything else that was going wrong in my life, and just focused on the moment I was sharing with Eli.

He lied next to me, my body curled into his, my head on his chest as it rose and fell with every breath he took. People like Alli had always said sex would make you feel closer to your significant other, but it wasn't until right now that I actually believed it. It was as if Eli's secrecy had built a wall between us, never allowing us to connect the way we just had. It made me a bit angry that it my brother's death is what made him finally open up, and I needed an answer.

"Why didn't you tell me before?"

He sighed. "It's hard to talk about... it's hard to think about. That's the first time I've ever told someone. I mean, Cece and Bullfrog and my therapist and everyone else around me knew what happened, but they never knew what was going through my head. They didn't know that I was angry at my parents for having another baby. They didn't know the terribly selfish thoughts I was thinking as I sat in the office at school. I hate myself for being so selfish back then. My parents were dying and all I cared about was the fact that I wasn't going to be the center of attention anymore."

"You were ten, Eli," I said softly, "and you didn't know what was happening. You were just a little kid."

"That doesn't make it any better, Clare." he said, sitting up. For a second, I thought I said the wrong thing, but then he pulled his boxers on and said, "I'll be right back, I have to pee."

He disappeared up the stairs, and I sat up as well, pulling my underwear on. I opted for Eli's shirt instead of mine, slipping my arms into his sleeves and buttoning it as I stepped out onto the patio. I closed my eyes and listened for the seams of the storm, for the secret sounds Jake used to hear. We played as kids, and we both knew Jake being the Thunder God was a power for me to believe in, but I wanted to imagine what Jake felt like back when he was my hero. I listened and I waited.

Gusts of wind heaved off the ocean and slapped against the house, the palm trees flailed their leaves, and when I heard a lightning bolt burst nearby, I cried out for Jake. If he could only say the words, the storm would pass, and Eli could take me and the car and drive as far away and as fast as we could to get from here, until everything was still and quiet and right again.

The sounds of the waves were like traffic, the steady rush of the highway leading home. The spray hissed into the air like the flicker of a match lighting the cigarettes Eli and I smoked in his car. Raindrops fell faster and the winds began to separate; the flap of palm leaves were the streamers at my sixth birthday party, the hush of grass blades were Jake's fingers brushing my cheek. The layers of the storm were falling away. I could hear the clouds as they crawled toward the shore, the air moaning as the pressure dropped, and then, in the depths of the storm I heard a voice.

It was a faint whisper, pollen floating in the summer air as I drove with Eli along the rural roads of Illinois. The voice sung louder, clearer, growing strong and vibrating, crackling like leaves underfoot as Jake and I ran through the woods behind our house. The hum swelled and the snaps merged until I could hear the clouds glittering with electricity. I felt a shape performing, long and jagged, and I reached my hand out to grasp it. The hairs on my body bristled, my arms rose up with the trance, and I brought my palms together to clap the world awake.

A blade of blue-white lightning drowned the yard in light and the triumphant bellow of thunder followed.

When I opened my eyes, a purple gash floated across my vision and a palm tree loomed over the house, skewered by lightning and groaning as it fell, splintering wood and shattering the skylight, pouring rain and broken glass into the house where Eli was.

I wanted to scrunch myself into a ball, to crawl under a picnic table and wait for rescue, as if holding completely still could keep the house from crumbling.

The roof sagged under the weight of the tree, crushing the second floor where Eli must have been. I was afraid in that moment, choking on black terror, but I was moving, running through the rain falling into the living room and up the stairs, where the body of the tree had torn open the roof.

My voice echoed through the empty house calling Eli's name above the wind and rain. I saw a light at the end of the hall and I could hear the rain hitting the ceramic floor where the roof beams had buckled and split.

I imagined Eli crushed by the trunk of some storm-cursed tree, with a cracked skull, bleeding out onto the bathroom floor. I imagined Jake and how he must have looked when he died - thin and pale, struggling to breathe against the fluid in his lungs, knowing that if this infection didn't kill him, it would be the next one, or maybe the one after that. Had he been afraid? If there had been a thunderstorm that night, would I have called him? Would he have held on a little longer?

In the bathroom, I found Eli propped up against the bathtub, bleeding from his scalp, but conscious. A chunk of plaster had fallen loose and caught him on the temple. The wind swallowed the sound of my voice, but when I knelt down, Eli wrapped his arms around my neck and whispered, "I'm so sorry, Clare... for everything. Don't leave me. Please, don't ever leave me."

I wasn't exactly sure what all he was apologizing for, but I said nothing and pressed a kiss to his non-bloody temple. Under the open roof of that empty house, as I held Eli and listened for the sound of sirens through the rain, I imagined a coil tying us together, an underground wire leading back home, to my bedroom and Eli's crawlspace, to Jake's hospital bed and the window in his old room, along the roads from Florida to Illinois and branching out in all directions like the telluric currents carrying the electricity of the world - deep and invisible beneath the land and ocean, gathering charge where drifting clouds could explode into thunderstorms.

Eli was right, this trip turned out to be romantic after all.

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Ten points for everyone who caught the two _The Fault In Our Stars_ references. ;)


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